Activist Brian Willson handcycles from Portland to Bay Area on book tour

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Brian Willson, who lost both of his legs, when he was run over by a train and maimed while sitting on the tracks of the Naval Weapons Station in Concord Calif. protesting weapons shipments to Central Amercia, sits in the crowd of around 80 people Saturday Sept 1, 2007, to hear sppeches . (Dan Rosenstrauch/Staff Archive)

About to embark on an 800-mile book tour via arm-propelled handcycle, his energy transmits explosively, even over the phone.

“We’ve not been designed to just say, ‘Yes sir! No sir!’ to authority figures. That was not me, and I don’t think it’s any of us,” he begins.

Willson, who lost both legs to a munitions train at the Concord Naval Weapons Station on Sept. 1, 1987, has packed his patriotism, verbal acuity and command of recent world history into a 373-page memoir, “Blood on the Tracks.”

To promote the book and to demonstrate his commitment to living a simple, non-carbon based lifestyle, the Vietnam veteran is cycling 40 miles a day. Every revolution of his 20-inch wheels carries him six feet. Departing from Portland, Ore., he will spin his cycle nearly 700,000 times before arriving in Walnut Creek on July 13.

The Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center is offering Bay Area residents an opportunity to hear Willson speak about his life and the devastating injury that burns like a raging wildfire, fueling his passion for protest.

“I believe in disobedience and uprisings. When will 500,000 people in this country feel it’s necessary to go out in the streets to protest?” he asks.

He doesn’t sound angry: he sounds like a lawyer, an advocate, a teacher. All of which he is, but Willson believes petitioning the government no longer works. Acquisition has almost replaced citizenship. Good communities, he insists, will result only from interrupting “business as usual.”

Decades after the war in Vietnam, he recalls his transformation from U.S. Air Force officer to the man on the Concord tracks, fighting arms shipments to Nicaragua.

“In April of 1969 when I went into (Vietnam) to assess the aftereffects of bombing, I discovered we were bombing small villages. I couldn’t believe what I saw. I couldn’t walk any further: there were too many bodies immediately at my feet.

“I “… stopped to look at this emaciated woman. Her eyes were open and I was glued to her eyes when I realized the napalm had burned off her skin. My whole body was trembling inside. This woman and her children were family. I was crying and gagging. A colonel asked me what my problem was, and I said, ‘I am looking at the death of my family.'”

That reality — that Brian Willson, American, was irrevocably connected to humanity around the globe — blew his All-American mind.

“My little notion of the story: I realized it was all a lie. Forty years later, I am still realizing how deep a lie it is,” he laments.

Still, despite his growing disillusionment in military honor, Willson’s rational brain thought the train aimed at his body on that brilliant, early fall day, would stop.

“I knew about military procedures around installations. I had studied it all summer long in 1987. Being a law-trained person, I think things through and I’m conservative in my own process. It was an inconceivable notion that the train would run,” Willson says, his voice touched with amazement, despite the 24 years that have passed since the incident.

Willson finds grace in the fact that his then-wife, Holly Rauen, was a midwife and had both medical knowledge and an IV kit in her car.

And there’s mercy in his traumatic amnesia.

“My first memory is being in a bed, looking at green plants and I’m saying, ‘Wow, what a jail cell! I get green plants and my partner (Holly) is with me!'”

In mid-July, Willson plans to return to the tracks. Nuremberg Actions, the group he and a number of friends formed to stage the protest at CNWS, has a reunion in Berkeley.

“For 28 months after what happened in 1987, there were so many people on the tracks that trains were blocked that entire time,” he recalls, with gentle pride.

Ever since that day, Willson has been trying to recover his humanity.

“I’ve tasted eco-consciousness enough to know that my longevity is not important, but by my dignity is,” he confides. “Cooperation and empathy are the two most important features for survival.”

There’s no doubt Willson intends to survive. Building a life independent of big oil and reliant on local foods and simple goods is his daily purpose.

Understanding the psychological and political implications of growing up in what he calls “an absurd system”, is his mission — and the key to filling the streets with nonviolent activism.